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This article was written on 04 Apr 2016, and is filled under Uncategorized.

The Future of Catholicism Part 8: Hope for the Future

What Does the Future Hold?

The ‘Usual Suspects’: signs of this revival include: new Catholic schools and colleges that are truly Catholic; reversion to a more authentic Catholic character by some of the older institutions that had gone astray; new media ventures such as EWTN and Catholic radio; new periodicals and publishers, as well as the new Catholic Internet; new orders, institutes, and organizations promoting Catholic spirituality, causes such as the pro-life and pro-family movements; the appearance of a new generation of gung-ho “John Paul II priests”; and, above all, bishops standing up to the current secularist juggernaut in areas such as healthcare, marriage, and the like. The response of the Catholic people generally to the bishops’ call for resistance to the HHS mandate is particularly noteworthy.

The Problem: Lack of Depth

The Prophecies of Fatima etc.: warnings and hope.

THE NEW EVANGELIZATION

Evangelizing Liberal Catholics: From Bleeding Heart to the Sacred Heart

Evangelizing Zombie Catholics: Beauty

Evangelizing the Neo-Cons: Accept Failure, Integrity, New Hope

Evangelizing Rad-Trads: Taking the Edge Off

Evangelizing Hipsters

I’d like to add my own pet hope. And yet, there are signs that hope is emerging, in, of all places, small groups of counter-cultural secular young people who are attempting to create communities of resistance to modernity in large and small cities throughout America: the ‘hipsters’.

Heirs of the counter-culture which emerged in the ’60s in America. There were notable Catholics in this movement (e.g. Kerouac, Salinger), but most Catholics allied themselves with mainstream bourgeois values, and saw the counter-culture is almost entirely negative terms: sexual license, drugs, anti-authoritarianism, bacchanalia. A tragic moment. Bob Marley (of all people).